


Beauty

by thefairyknight



Series: Avengers Short Fics [5]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Grief, Introspection, Romanticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 11:42:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3935533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefairyknight/pseuds/thefairyknight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The universe has a habit of destroying the things she treasures, and she thinks, if she is not careful, she could come to treasure him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty

 

 

He is beautiful, inside and out.

So beautiful she is almost afraid to reach out, sometimes, even though he has invited her to. She is afraid she might mar that beauty, somehow. Doom it. Like some delicate flower that could be bruised by a single touch.

The universe has a habit of destroying the things she treasures, and she thinks, if she is not careful, she could come to treasure him.

It may be that she already does. Just a little.

“May I ask what you are doing?” he says, drifting up to her where she sits on the top of a hill, just beyond the reach of the Avengers facility.

“I’m admiring the scenery,” she tells him. “It’s beautiful here.”

Even moreso for the addition he brings to it. Light loves the Vision. It gathers in his cape, like warm embers, traces over his skin and clothes, changing the hues in places where it lands. It rests in the gem on his forehead, and gleams in his eyes. She has never been so remorseful, before now, that she has no talent for art. It would be a travesty if no one ever painted this.

“It is beautiful,” he agrees, looking out over the scenery, the blue sky, the distant road, cutting through the terrain like a river.

“Back home…” she starts, and then stops herself.

He looks at her expectantly.

“Nevermind.”

“It’s difficult for you to speak of,” he surmises.

She looks down and away from him.

“I wanted to protect it. I really did. So much,” she says.

“I know,” he tells her, gently.

“You should go,” she decides. “I’m sure you have better things to do than hover around here, watching me trying not to lose my mind.”

“You aren’t losing your mind, Wanda,” he assures her, ignoring her request.

“I did,” she admits, the words tumbling out without her permission. “I was so angry, for so long. I still am. It’s a kind of insanity, anger. It must be. How else could it have come to this? How else could I have… could I have let myself be the cause of all that’s happened?”

“Emotions are powerful,” Vision says.

She almost laughs at the simplicity of it, at the understatement.

“Emotions are powerful,” she agrees. “Even more powerful when you have other powers to go with them.”

“We are dangerous beings,” he tells her. “It is inevitable that when we err, the consequences are far-reaching.”

“You haven’t erred. So far, you’ve done well,” she says, taken aback by his casual inclusion of himself in the same category as her.

“To my knowledge,” he concedes. “Hindsight may yet prove my actions to be misguided. And, I have only made a handful of decisions so far.”

“You think you will regret saving humanity?” she wonders.

“No. But I think I may regret failing to save Ultron.”

She looks back up at him, and his expression is distant. Contemplative.

“He was different from me, but more like me than any other being I know of. Without him, I am solitary. I will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future.”

She swallows, and brushes up against his mind. Faint impressions of remorse and grief answer her, resignation and just a hint of despair. It is woven in with a note of self-deprecation that she despises, this lament that he was not able to find a way to save both Ultron and mankind.

“I know what it is like to lose the one person who understands you. Who is like you,” she says. Her eyes burn. She raises a hand and ruthlessly swats her tears away. “Ultron was _nothing_ like you. He never would have been. If you’d saved him, he only would have found another way to poison everything around him.”

Surprise. She withdraws her power from him, as some of his despair clears, but he surprises her in turn by reaching back, for a moment; a brush of thought that is calm and soothing.

“He was still… something to me,” the Vision insists.

“I hated that metal bastard. I’d rip his heart out a thousand times if I could,” she says.

“I know.”

“But if he meant something to you, he meant something to you,” she finds herself permitting, with a hopeless shrug. “You can mourn him. I won’t tell anyone.”

Vision hesitates, for a moment, and then drifts over. When he hesitates again, she scoots a little to the side, and pointedly makes room for him to come and sit beside her, even though there is already more than enough on the hilltop. It’s probably unwise. But she doesn’t really want to be alone right now, and she can’t bring herself to send him away.

“I am sorry, for your brother,” he says.

Beautiful. Far, far too beautiful, this soul. This world is going to tarnish him, even if Wanda herself does not.

“You’re kind,” she notes. “How, how are you so kind?”

“I don’t know that there’s any other way I should be,” he says. “I don’t understand the appeal of cruelty.”

“That could change,” she warns him. “The world is cruel. It’s just part of life. Sometimes, when you have been hurt, when there is no way to make it right, nothing to repair what you have lost, the only thing you can do is make someone else hurt, too.”

Vision mulls this over for a moment.

“That seems like it would only perpetuate a destructive cycle,” he notes. “One person would be cruel to another, and then another, and eventually everyone would suffer.”

“That’s the point. Just to not be alone in your misery,” she declares, but her eyes are burning, and her heart is heavy with the weight of remorse. She curls her knees up, unable to stop it, and tries to stem the new tide of tears with her sleeves.

After a moment, a hand comes to rest at her shoulder, warm even through the fabric of her jacket.

“You are not alone,” Vision says.

She sobs, and before she can think the better of it, she reaches over and buries her face into his shoulder.

For a moment he sits there, awkwardly, but before she can pull away he puts his arms around her.

The stay like that for a long while, until the sun has begun to set, and the air has turned cold, and Wanda has run out of tears.

“Back home,” she eventually whispers, hoarse from weeping. “I used to go and sneak out to different places, with my brother. I would try and find spots that looked out over the city. Over Sokovia, and the wilderness. I wanted to see things from a different perspective. Sometimes you find the most beautiful things where you least expect them.”

Like him. She never would have dreamed what the monstrosity she first glimpsed in the cradle would eventually become.

“I think that may be because there is some beauty everywhere,” Vision suggests.

She lets out a huff of breath against him, and pushes back. He lets her go.

“I hope you always see it,” she says, and it feels like a wish. Like a prayer.

“I don’t know if I will. But I can promise I will always look for it.”

“Even better,” she decides.


End file.
